A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Nov. 15: Yes...

....the killings in Paris were terrible....

I watched Obama on TV as he extended his deepest sympathy to the people of France for what they had suffered. And I thought...

"Isn't this the man who created, financed and supplied a war that has driven millions out of Syria? Isn't this the man who is supplying bombs to be dropped by the richest people on earth on Yemen and its people who are among the poorest on earth? Isn't this the man who sends out drones every day to kill thousands, most of them innocent?" Isn't it terrorizing for those on the receiving end of all that?

The use of bombs to terrorize civilians has been standard practice at least since 1920, when Churchill used it to bomb Kurdish villages. By World War 2, the deliberate killing of civilians by bombing had become a major purpose of all air forces.

And France - isn't that the country that murdered uncounted numbers of Algerians because they had the nerve to want to be free? And that murdered hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (French Indo-China) for the same reason?

Which of our leaders extended sympathy to those victims?

I noticed the same thing in the news media. They were full of horror at what was happening in Paris, and routinely expressed sympathy for all the innocent victims. But you know, I can't think of a single instance over the last 80 years of any sympathy expressed for the millions of innocent people killed by our side. Is it, perhaps, because we think those people, being non-white or of a different religion, don't feel terror when they're bombed or machine-gunned?

What a pack of hypocrites we are! The history of the world is a history of terrorism and mass murder of innocents. All of us humans have done it. That's how empires were built. Even tiny Belgium built its wealth on the mass murder, torture and starvation of millions in the Congo. The U.S. and Canada, going back to their colonial days, built on a system of slavery that killed millions just in transit. They died in 'mailbox' slots in the hulls of sailing ships, slots just big enough so they could like down in them, chained, for the long voyage.

For over a century, most of the killing in war has been, quite deliberately, the killing and terrorizing of civilians. It happens every day, and most of it never even gets reported. But do it to white folks on our side, well, that's extremism.

The affect this has on our attitude is to drive us into hatred and revenge. In other words, extremism created extremism which creates extremism which creates....
and so on. And, on our side, the extremism will be encouraged by those who stand to make money, piles of money, out of it.

The cry is already out there. War! War against ISIS. Kill. That'll show them.

Actually, it won't. The reason ISIS exists is because we created it. We created it by our extremism, by our killing, our looting, our destruction of societies all over the world - and especially in the middle east. Al Quaeda and other terrorist groups were created by the U.S.,originally to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan. It's not a coincidence that 'extremist' groups are often seen using American weapons. It's not a coincidence that Saudi Arabia is often the pipeline for these weapons.

When you destroy a society, something arises in its place. Usually, it's somethiing pretty evil. More destruction will make things worse. The destruction of Nazi Germany did not end Naziism. It still has a large following in much of Europe. And, thoughout the western world, we are seeing essential features of it on the rise. Modern capitalism (as we mistakenly call our political and economic system) is very similar to Naziism. That's why Canadian and American capitalists were so supportive of Hitler for many years.

We killed over a million, mostly civilians, in Iraq. We have all but destroyed Syria as a nation. We killed millions in Vietnam. We're destroying Yemen - and nobody has even asked why -. These all sound pretty extreme to me.

And the one gain in all this could be that we will become allies of Russia because it has scores to settle with the Muslims of Chechen - the ones the U.S.once used to destabilize Russia.

No. For all the hysteria among the John McCains of this world, a war with ISIS will do nothing but create more enemies for us.

The reality is that in World War 2, we won the war, but lost the peace. Ever since 1945, we have almost constantly been at war. Can't help it. All those big bullies like Syria and Lebanon and Grenada and Cuba and Haiti and Guatemala have been picking on the poor, little U.S. And all the billionaires who own our news media have been very upset about that.

Oh, and depend on it - all the village idiots that we call Conservatives in Ottawa will be howling for us to keep our aircraft in Iraq. Doing that will make no notable change in events. But it will mean that we're all committed to take part if this develops into a world war. And there is a very strong possibility that it will.

So what to do?

The sensible thing would be to concentrate on saving and rebuilding as much as possible of Syria as we can. We desperately need to rebuild and stabilize the societies we have destroyed. Those also include Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine.. we need to put a lid on the ambitions of Israel and Turkey.

We need stability in the midde east, not more war. We should also recognize that Europe is not going to able to cope with the refugee crisis - and Canada and the U.S. are not going to help to any significant degree. That means we have to make the middle east stable again - so those refugees can return.

It also means we have to negotiate with ISIS.

At the same time, we have to recognize that all of this is the result of a travesty of capitalism that has been allowed to run wild. That's as true of Russia and China as it is of us. We have to bring that under control, and put power back into the hands of the people we elect.

We also have to get over the bigotry which seems to come with being a human. None of us is a member of a super race. None of us is without evil. And if there are those whose evil leads them to terrorize others, let's remember how our evil has led us to terrorize. Extremism is created by extremism.

I know that's a tall order.

But we don't have any choice. Or much time.
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Readers have sent in some sites worth looking at. So I include them below. The first is a remarkable and touching piece of common sense.

https://instagram.com/p/-DmUOwJ0tC/

The is by an excellent scholar of current events who asks the questions no major news media have asked about the Paris attacks. What he says may sound bizarre. But the "false flag" attack is all too common in our world.

This is by far the best short review of the history of the current situation we find ourselves in. I agree with it completely.

Just a bit behind the Iberians, the British started all this off as imperialists hundreds of years ago. Their later presence in Afghanistan and subsequent withdrawal was given a big thank-you-for-nothing from the locals by the massacre at the Khyber Pass.

There's no doubt that in those days Western man regarded all people with skin colour less than lily-white as mere savages, darkies, wogs and whatever other sobriquets the intellectually advanced thinkers from London could dream up as words of pure derision for those who had not yet invented firearms. It was fundamentally racist but of course nobody thought so back at the Colonial Office or in polite society. It was merely the predominant mantra of the day. And the Spanish and Portuguese thought so too, along with the Dutch and Johnny-come-lately Belgians.

Here in Canada, I was amazed to read in a Nova Scotia history textbook approved by the Dept of Education and published in 1948, referring to little "Sambos" helping to load ships in Halifax Harbour. 1948! Used well into the 1950s. And with a large black population here for over 150 years at that time and actually being educated in our schools no doubt delighted to discover what their "betters" referred to them as.

Canada had already set about trying to re-educate our aboriginal population far earlier. Typical of the British outlook, and no doubt indicative of the racist way, particularly in the Canadian West but certainly not limited to that region, in which Canadians have generally conducted themselves. We are no saints. We just believe we are. Our treatment of Chinese railway workers, not allowing Sikhs to enter Canada in 1914 or Jews in 1938 illustrate the bedrock social foundation for Harper's toxic rule decades later.

As you say, the British found bombing Iraqi villages in the 1920s a spot of decent target practice, old boy. It fundamentally led to the replacement of British hegemony over Iraqi oil fields by US companies to the bewilderment of the twits in London.

Of course, the American attitude that no history exists except American history (after all, why study history books from other countries when America is out to change the world with brand-new never-ever-dreamed-up-before-by-the-mind-of-man US ideas?) has led them down the rabbit-hole of repeating everyone else's mistakes except on a Grand American scale. And then spending decades writing their own books as to what went wrong in Viet Nam, for example, while completely missing the fundamental point. Which is simply that most countries would rather work out their own system of government all by themselves, rather than having a bunch of invaders from overseas telling them how to do it. Such an attitude is not capable of entering the tiny American mind. Nor that of the French for that matter, who are self-hypnotized into believing there is no civilization higher than that of French intellectual thought, and which therefore subjects former colonials living on their soil to a mere existence in ghettoes until they come to their senses. /continues

What with the fundamental error of the self-evident truths proclaimed in the US Constitution, put forward by rich right-wing ex-pat Brits unwilling to pay taxes to Britain, and wanting to keep those slaves they owned working hard, the US mind managed to put forward these "truths" which of course only applied to white males. That was understood and didn't have to be written down. Women and "savages" were not human and therefore not included; any educated person implicitly realized that in those days.

We fast forward to the US invasion of Iraq, where Bush vowed to bring "democracy" to the country. Any twit with a modicum of historical knowledge would realize that in the vast majority of the world, democracy means nothing to the average person, no not even in India. But Bush, being American, just assumed that everyone out there hungered for US-style freedom and democracy, as if it were some self-evident "truth". And we all know what a success that Iraq campaign has been.

The American need to be loved seems to manifest itself in invading other countries, getting rid of the "bad guys", and assuming that free elections, democracy, strip malls and 24 hour liquor stores would sprout up spontaneously thereafter. In fact none of these nations asked to be invaded or have their institutions trashed in the first place. Try to tell an American that, and they are hurt and mystified. It doesn't fit into the US pantheon of possible outcomes, but does lead to them wondering why foreigners hate them and erect signs like "Yankee go home", and into rejecting the obvious reasons for their unpopularity. They see themselves as the good guys, how could anyone despise them? Dimwitted doesn't even begin to describe them.

Assuming other peoples have the same outlook you do is fundamentally racist. So of course, the dichotomy where France (a sort of democracy) sees no connection with bombing another country and the horror revisted on them by people forced to be radical or to be subjected to a foreign way-of-life they do not desire, is rampant among the countries of the Western world. It is a racist outlook by the West.

Meanwhile, the knuckle-draggers in our Western societies who have zero thoughtful insights as to how they would like it if they were to be invaded and ordered around, disconnect the realities and call for more retribution on the people they radicalized in the first place.

Sad.

And I haven't even touched on the religious aspects of all this. There does not appear to be any solution to this destructive wave of humanity attempting to wipe itself out. So frankly, I give up. It is the human condition to be utter and complete nincompoops.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep